PhD thesis final - Royal Holloway, University of London

Chapter 3- Research contexts and methodologiesto their friends if they know somebody who fit in with the requirements of my informants.I was so touched by her warm-heartedness not only because her family assisted me somuch with settling down, providing me with accommodation, feeding me and bringingme into their social circle, but also, in her mind, she treated me as a younger sister. It issuch company that really made me feel that I had a family as well as a home in Shanghai.Returning to their house, I just felt like I was at home …(Field diary 14/04/2007)Although I felt like cultivating an open social relationship with my informants andenjoyed hanging out with them, I was still alert to maintaining a detached relationship(Brewer 2000; Fielding 2001) by not involving myself too much in the their socialcircle and acting as an innocent student so that I could shuttle between insider andoutsider role (Herbert 2000). I sensed that my tactics as an insider and staying detachedserved to exclude me from my informants and gradually made me a person who washandy to talk to for my close female informants. In this regard, I was always sensitive tothe situations of our meetings and tried my best to take our friendship into considerationfirst and foremost. I often discarded and forgot my research when I felt that we talkedlike old friends and thus had to remind myself that I was still doing research and wouldtell them in a joking manner that ‗this is quite interesting and I should include it in mythesis‘ when I heard something relevant to my study. By doing so, I hoped that I hadpaid attention to ethical issues and did not exploit the friendship I developed in the field.Also, I acknowledged that I, as a researcher, gained much from my informants‘experiences and information, and I not only wished that they enjoyed my company butalso I wanted to give something back to them by means of either emotional support orin a practical way. As such, I helped my hosts by supervising their children‘s homeworkas well as by being their consultant regarding issues around education. My former87